Current Developments in Typography

• Typographical developments in currency

• Currency of developing economies

• Current developments in typography

• Economics of typography development

• Typography for developing economies

Typographical developments in currency

The Indian rupee will soon sport a new sign. The Union finance ministry is organising a public competition to design a new symbol for the currency like the dollar sign $.

The successful designer will be awarded Rs 2.5 lakh, but will have to surrender the copyright to the government of India. most countries in the world have distinct identification symbols for their currencies, but there is still no official currency sign for the Indian rupee. Only `Rs' is used to represent it, and India shares the abbreviated form of the rupee with Pakistan, Nepal, Seychelles and Sri Lanka. Reserve Bank of India officials welcomed the move and said the initiative should have been launched decades ago...

Among the guidelines mentioned for designing the sign are that it should be applicable to a standard keyboard, and be in the Indian script or a visual representation.

Via Times of India 2009-03-06, Shortlisted designers for Indian Rupee

A contest to find a sign for the Indian rupee

The Union finance ministry is very close to selecting a symbol for the Indian currency just like the US dollar, Euro, Pound Sterling, Japanese Yen, and others. The jury has short listed five of the 3,331 eligible entries that were received.

Via Times of India 2010-02-27: Indian Rupee and Pound Sterling

Finalizing top contenders for selection for Indian Rupee Pound Sterling design

The Indian rupee will soon have a unique symbol — a blend of the Devanagri 'Ra' and Roman 'R' — joining elite currencies like the US dollar, euro, British pound and Japanese yen in having a distinct identity. The new symbol, designed by Bombay IIT post-graduate D Udaya Kumar, was approved by the cabinet today.

Though the symbol will not be printed or embossed on currency notes or coins, it would be included in the 'Unicode Standard' and major scripts of the world to ensure that it is easily displayed and printed in the electronic and print media. Unicode is an international standard that allows text data to be interchanged globally without conflict.

"It is a perfect blend of Indian and Roman letters — capital 'R' and Devanagri 'Ra' which represents rupaiah, to appeal to international and Indian audiences..."

Via Times of India 2010-07-15, Indian currency symbol

Indian rupee gets a symbol

Left, image: 6/24/2010

Via Times of India 2010-06-24, Indian ethos and culture: The Indian rupee symbol

Currency of developing economies

The UPA government's imaginative new keyboard-compatible symbol for the staid 'Rs', reducing four keystrokes to two, will distinguish India's rupee from the clutter of other countries that also use the word or some variation of it like Indonesia's rupiah. This ubiquity dates to a forgotten era long predating Pax Britannica and is a legacy of times when Indians ventured east not to conquer but to trade and left behind, as historians like A L Basham and George Coedes note, their culture throughout South East Asia.

via Go Beyond Symbolism, Times of India (July 2010).

Current developments in typography

The HTML5 standard including WOFF was introduced in 2010

Typeface improvements in HTML5 web fonts: Typeface scales up and keeps pace with HTML5. Supported by modern browsers as of 2011.

Economics of typography development

Adobe and font development: Version upgrades for typeface. By David Lemon - 2:50 PM on April 25, 2011

We’re well aware of this need. Adobe is in a rather different position than most foundries, as most of the copies of our fonts are licensed as part of application software bundles or from our reseller partners. And virtually nobody actually registers their fonts. So we have no clue who the vast majority of our legitimate users are. Nobody else at Adobe is going to solve this for us; we have to craft our own solutions. There are two potential kinds of approaches to the font-update conundrum: technical and business-model. We have sketched out an architecture for a technical solution, and an engineer is working on the code. It’s too early to say when (or whether) this will ship, but I’m encouraged that something’s underway there.

We’re also hard at work on some business-model innovations that may help resolve this sort of thing. Of course these also require technology, but that’s also in process.

Via the comment section of a recent Adobe typography blog post, April 2011.

Typography for developing economies

Adobe article about use of Rupee symbol in Indic fonts

Despite having been made official less than a year ago, it seems that the Indian rupee symbol is quickly gaining widespread use within India. This has resulted in several of Adobe’s major international customers requesting font support for this character. In order to accommodate these requests, the type team at Adobe has added the rupee symbol to the following typeface families: Minion Pro, Myriad Pro, Courier Std and Letter Gothic Std.

Four Adobe Type Families Adopt Indian Rupee Symbol via Adobe Tyblography, April 2011

Google and Indic Fonts

On May 27, 2011, Google announced that the Google Translation API (and many others) would be deprecated in 2011, with no replacement. In mid-June 2011, Google introduced of five new Indic alpha languages supported by Google Translate. Each has a different web font, available for free from Google.

Google Translation Story Continues via gooplex.wordpress.com.